The 'Wow' Signal - Again

From: UFO UpDates - Toronto <post.nul>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:35:49 -0500
Archived: Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:35:49 -0500
Subject: The 'Wow' Signal - Again
Source: TheAtlantic.Com
http://tinyurl.com/6rn73qx
Friday, February 17, 2012
The 'Wow!' Signal: One Man's Search For Seti's Most Tantalizing
Trace Of Alien Life
By Ross Andersen
For decades, Robert Gray has been trying to duplicate the most
surprising and still-unexplained observation in the history of
the search for extraterrestrial life.
wowsignal.jpg
Late one night in the summer of 1977, a large radio telescope
outside Delaware, Ohio intercepted a radio signal that seemed
for a brief time like it might change the course of human
history. The telescope was searching the sky on behalf of SETI,
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the signal,
though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a
message beamed from another world. Despite its potential import,
several days went by before Jerry Ehman, a project scientist for
SETI, noticed the data. He was flipping through the computer
printouts generated by the telescope when he noticed a string of
letters within a long sequence of low numbers - ones, twos,
threes and fours. The low numbers represent background noise,
the low hum of an ordinary signal. As the telescope swept across
the sky, it momentarily landed on something quite extraordinary,
causing the signal to surge and the computer to shift from
numbers to letters and then keep climbing all the way up to "U,"
which represented a signal thirty times higher than the
background noise level. Seeing the consecutive letters, the mark
of something strange or even alien, Ehman circled them in red
ink and wrote "Wow!" thus christening the most famous and
tantalizing signal of SETI's short history: The "Wow!" signal.
[More at site... and in the UFO UpDates Archive:
http://tinyurl.com/83xeflv - thanks to Diana Cammack for the
lead]
http://tinyurl.com/6rn73qx
Friday, February 17, 2012
The 'Wow!' Signal: One Man's Search For Seti's Most Tantalizing
Trace Of Alien Life
By Ross Andersen
For decades, Robert Gray has been trying to duplicate the most
surprising and still-unexplained observation in the history of
the search for extraterrestrial life.
wowsignal.jpg
Late one night in the summer of 1977, a large radio telescope
outside Delaware, Ohio intercepted a radio signal that seemed
for a brief time like it might change the course of human
history. The telescope was searching the sky on behalf of SETI,
the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the signal,
though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a
message beamed from another world. Despite its potential import,
several days went by before Jerry Ehman, a project scientist for
SETI, noticed the data. He was flipping through the computer
printouts generated by the telescope when he noticed a string of
letters within a long sequence of low numbers - ones, twos,
threes and fours. The low numbers represent background noise,
the low hum of an ordinary signal. As the telescope swept across
the sky, it momentarily landed on something quite extraordinary,
causing the signal to surge and the computer to shift from
numbers to letters and then keep climbing all the way up to "U,"
which represented a signal thirty times higher than the
background noise level. Seeing the consecutive letters, the mark
of something strange or even alien, Ehman circled them in red
ink and wrote "Wow!" thus christening the most famous and
tantalizing signal of SETI's short history: The "Wow!" signal.
[More at site... and in the UFO UpDates Archive:
http://tinyurl.com/83xeflv - thanks to Diana Cammack for the
lead]
Listen to 'Strange Days... Indeed' - The PodCast
At:
http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/sdi/program/
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